2021 Data Center Global Market Comparison

L o w M i d H i g h

MARKET SIZE

CATEGORY WEIGHT

Total market size is a valuable indicator of strength, for historical, current, and future development. A historical predilection toward data centers leads to the knowledge and planning abilities for further builds; many of the major data center markets such as Northern Virginia or Singapore keenly understand the needs of a major facility and can accurately assess their ability to assist. Current market sizes are reflective of a robust local clientele; modern local client mixes often include hyperscale cloud services, mid-size cloud services, government, financial services, content providers, and increasingly healthcare. Locations that have all these thus have plenty of demand for data center capacity. Workloads of the near and far future have the potential to create a more distributed global architecture, leading to the buildout of the “edge,” or bringing computing closer to the end user. The Internet of Things (or IoT, essentially adding network capability to devices that previously did not have them) and related intelligent manufacturing could derive greater efficiencies and reduce production costs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) requires an enormous amount of processing power yet could continue to reimagine software development and data processing. Fifth generation wireless networks (5G) continue their ambitious rollout plans and their increased speeds could revolutionize data transmission. All require ever-greater amounts of infrastructure in new locations, and all stand to generate further data center construction.

As for today, Northern Virginia clearly remains the largest market globally as the only location that has surpassed 1 gigawatt of capacity. The current 1.2 gigawatts on offer and the over 300 megawatts currently under construction will keep the area on top for some time to come. Tokyo and London follow, with exciting modern hyperscale builds rapidly adding to the Tokyo landscape for the first time, and London often as the first port of call for those entering Europe. Many markets profiled in the current edition of this report expect to double or triple in size over the coming decade, as several large cities throughout Europe and Asia have yet to develop data center markets to match. The battle for market share will likely take place in an ever-increasing array of locations, and those with the ability to scale accordingly will win.

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